Welcome to Longwave

I’ve been feeling oddly tired lately. Not in a “need a holiday” way. More like a low-level hum of exhaustion that never switches off.

And I think it's mostly because of AI. Not because it’s bad. Or scary. Or because I think it’s about to kill us all. Mostly because it’s everywhere, all at once, and the conversation around it is relentless.

I’m exhausted by everything I can do now.

Before AI, I didn’t lie awake thinking about the things I could make, or the ideas I could build. Most of them would’ve taken too much time, too much money, or too much energy to ever really exist.

Now they’re just a prompt away. And the potential of it all is… tiring.

I’ve worked around technology, business and creativity for all of my career, so I’m part of the problem. I’m also the guy who brings it up at dinner and then immediately regrets it.

Those dinners are where something interesting happens though.

Online, AI talk turns into tools and tricks very quickly. Prompt hacks. Demos. People performing certainty. Or performing fear. It’s loud and oddly impersonal.

Offline, it’s different. Slower. More hesitant. People talk about their jobs. Their usefulness. Whether they’re secretly relieved or quietly terrified. Whether they should lean in, pull back, or just ignore the whole thing and hope it passes.

Those are the conversations that stick with me. They don’t resolve. They linger for a while and return a week or so later.

This is me trying to give those conversations somewhere to go.

I don’t have a grand theory. I don’t think we’re headed for either extinction or immortality. I’m more interested in the messy bit in between. The part we’re already living in.

Questions like:

• How do you use AI at work without hollowing the work out?
• What does creativity even mean when machines can fake it so well?
• If a lot of “useful” work disappears, what happens to our sense of worth?
• And if work changes radically… do we actually want what comes next?

Longwave is where I’ll think about that stuff. Sometimes clearly. Sometimes badly. Probably sometimes in public before I’ve fully worked it out.

There will be essays, half-formed frameworks, things I’ve noticed in companies, and things I’ve noticed in myself. It’ll drift a bit. That’s intentional.

If you’re also trying to make sense of all this, you’re very welcome here.

— Alex

Longwave is a NowhereLand publication, authored by Alex Jones. NowhereLand is a creative growth collective building savvy, breakthrough products, brands and businesses. Follow us here.